·         Analysis

·         Critical evaluation

·         Autonomy

·         Team working

All the above are relevant to the research process and I hope to develop a game that can demystify the qualitative data analysis process. 

Whitton places a high value on collaborative learning. She quotes Wilson:

"a place where learners may work together and support each other as they use a variety of tools and information resources in their guided pursuit of learning goals and problem-solving activities" Wilson 1996:5

However, she stresses that the collaboration does not have to be part of the game but can be incorporated as part of the learning package for a particular set of learning outcomes.

Last year I took the Effective Course Design module and constructed a 10 week online course on qualitative analysis aimed at doctoral students or researchers new to qualitative analysis.  While each student on the course would come with their own research project, I constructed an initial collaboration activity where they were working together on the same material which was followed by individual AND cooperative work. They were developing analysis on their own individual project but the activities were structured so that on a regular basis they would report back their analysis-in-process to the small group they were assigned to.  And they would comment on each other’s work –as well as learn from each other.  I am thinking of designing a game for the collaborative activity part of this course where they are all working on the same material which either could replace the current collaborative activity in this course or could form part of new course aimed at those people who do not have a research project yet but who would like to learn about analyzing qualitative data. 

Whitton points out that while games are good at providing experiences and applying theories, they are not very good at providing meaningful reflection and abstract conceptualization.  For the kind of analysis game I would want to construct, reflection and conceptualization are very important.  Whitton specifies a number of additional activities that can support reflection and abstract conceptualization.  The ones I can see supporting developing an analysis include reflective diaries, small group work and production of artefacts such as presentations. 

Of course, I am jumping the gun here.  Whitton recommends starting with the learning objectives of a course and consider how you would normally meet them.  As I have already created an online course specifying my learning objectives, I intend to start with that.  At the moment, I think I can see how a game could fulfil the initial collaborative element of my learning objectives.  But I need to reflect on this further.  Then I can move into developing what Whitton calls a game concept specification:

·         Learning objectives

·         Genre

·         Brief description

·         Plot

·         Gaming activities

·         Constraints

·         Collaboration

·         Reflection

Reference

Whitton, N. (2010) Chapter 6, 'Designing a Digital Game for Learning'. In Learning with Digital Games: A practical guide to engaging students in higher education, London: Routledge.

I already had Google Earth on my computer and I have played with it before – mainly exploring different parts of the world – tracking my daughter when she went to Chile, last year – that sort of thing. But I have never created anything in Google Earth – although I have read placeholders and information that other people had put on it.

Before going away I was quite focussed on the reading for the week (see previous blogs) and doing some preliminary research to find out a) what games have been developed using Google Earth, b) educational resources using Google Earth and c) technical information, online tutorials etc on creating placemarks etc.

I was surprised by the number of educational resources (as well as other types of resources) that has been created with Google Earth.  One of them was a resource created by the UK Met Office on the effect of climate change on the Earth – with a timeline from 1999-2099.  Helen had mentioned climate change as a possible theme for our game and this Met Office climate change ‘skin’ seemed a good platform to build a game.  My Sonic Group team members liked the idea.  I immediately focussed on learning the technical aspects of creating placemarks etc and so did my team members.  I wasn’t focussed on what the learning objectives of the game were. I had a hazy idea that the players would learn about climate change from traversing the information the Met Office had already put in the climate change Google Earth ‘skin’.  I started to think about how game players could interact by taking on different roles in different parts of the world – with the idea that problems in one part of the world would also have impacts on other parts of the world – but quickly realised that was too ambitious.  Wesley showed us how we could create a quiz in Google Earth and that seemed a more realistic approach. So we have divided up the work in constructing the quiz but haven’t set out our learning objectives yet – although I can see we can do that retrospectively.  Given the time constraints and the skills we had to learn, we had to do this backwards.

However, I think we needed to first understand the affordances of Google Earth and what was possible before we could think of what kind of learning outcome would be best achieved within Google Earth. And I think the process I described above was doing that. So maybe it was not really so backwards.  This game is a first exploratory attempt to see what is possible using Google Earth. And our climate change topic is something that does uses the affordances that Google Earth offers.